Natalie Portman’s Only Western Movie Was Plagued By Behind-The-Scenes Drama

Throughout the 2010s, Brian Duffield more than did his part to keep the art of the original genre movie alive and thriving. Between his screenplays for the babysitter slasher-comedy “The Babysitter,” the post-apocalyptic monster adventure “Love and Monsters,” and the underwater survival thriller “Underwater” (okay, perhaps his titles could use a little work), Duffield emerged as one of the hottest talents in Hollywood before fully coming into his own as the writer-director behind the well-received high school horror rom-com “Spontaneous” and essentially dialogue-free alien invasion thriller “No One Will Save You” in the 2020s. But before any of that happened, the first produced film based on one of Duffield’s unique scrips became something of a disaster (through no fault of his own, mind you).

The movie in question, “Jane Got a Gun,” has the makings of an inventive spin on a familiar tune, much like Duffield’s other work. Directed by Gavin O’Connor (“Miracle,” “The Accountant”), the Western casts Natalie Portman as the eponymous firearm-wielding cowlady, a woman whose husband is nearly shot to death by his former gang of outlaws. With the criminals closing in on Jane and her loved ones (including their young daughter), Portman’s heroine reaches out to her ex-lover for help, forcing her to reopen old wounds and revisit her painful past all while fighting to stay alive in the present. It’s a meaty premise and one that might’ve played like gangbusters in the hands of the film’s original director Lynne Ramsay, the revered Scottish filmmaker who had excelled at crafting stories about people who find themselves in terrible situations that unlock their most haunting memories in the tense dramas “Morvern Callar,” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin.”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be, as “Jane Got a Gun” found itself beset by behind-the-scenes problems that culminated with Ramsay abandoning ship at the eleventh hour (somewhat literally, as we’ll get into shortly) and the film being dramatically overhauled in the wake. Here’s a breakdown of what happened.

From the outside, pre-production on “Jane Got a Gun” seemed innocuous enough. Other than Michael Fassbender dropping out of the cast due to a scheduling conflict with “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” the Western appeared to be making good progress in the lead-up to the intended first day of shooting in March 2013. That was before the news broke that Ramsay had quietly departed the project the weekend before filming was slated to begin, much to the shock of the cast and crew members who showed up to work that day only to find themselves down a director.

While producer Scott Steindorff was quick to vilify Ramsay with the aid of certain trades (not naming names), a subsequent investigation by The Hollywood Reporter painted a much more complicated picture of what went down. Where two of THR’s sources stated Ramsay hadn’t received either a finalized shooting schedule, script, or budget shortly before she left, another source alleged the filmmaker had “failed to deliver a shooting script despite several delays and increasingly bizarre behavior.” Either way, it appears Ramsay stepped away after “a three-day standoff” (apologies, but I think we all knew there was no way we were getting through this story without at least one cowboy pun) between her and Steindorff over the film’s final cut and other creative issues. The production later sued Ramsay over her dropping out, with the lawsuit being settled out of court (via Entertainment Weekly).

With Ramsay gone, Oscar-nominated cinematographer Darius Khondji (“The Lost City of Z,” “Uncut Gems”) and co-star Jude Law soon followed, after which Joel Edgerton — who plays Jane’s old flame — rewrote the script with Anthony Tambakis. Meanwhile, O’Connor (who’d previously worked with Edgerton and Tambakis on the acclaimed MMA drama “Warrior”) took over directing and, in one last bit of behind-the-scenes turmoil, Bradley Cooper replaced Law, only to drop out and be replaced himself by Ewan McGregor (who plays the film’s big bad). By that point, it was mid-2013. It would be another two and a half years before “Jane Got a Gun” finally opened in U.S. theaters on January 2016 after the film’s original co-distributor, Relativity Media, filed for bankruptcy in June 2015.

Despite all the pandemonium off screen, there was still reason to remain hopeful about “Jane Got a Gun” leading up to its arrival. Besides boasting a (revised) version of Duffield’s script, which had been good enough to make Black List of best unmade scripts in 2011, the film still boasted an Oscar-winning lead, loads of notable talent on both sides of the camera (I’m only just now mentioning that Jane’s husband is played by Noah Emmerich of “The Truman Show” and “The Americans” fame), and an intriguing revisionist take on the Western genre. Alas, as often happens with ideas that start out special before being heavily retooled, most critics agreed that “Jane Got a Gun” wasn’t flat out- bad so much as muddled and middling. To quote Observer’s Mark Kermode, “It’s all perfectly passable, but rather perfunctory, a word that could never be applied to one of Ramsay’s films.”

To be sure, it’s impossible not to wonder what Ramsay — an inimitable storyteller who makes introspective, understated films where major events that other movies might shove in the face of the viewer seem to happen just off-camera — would make of Duffield’s tale of love lost and violent men in the Old West. Even years after, she found her whole experience with “Jane Got a Gun” difficult to talk about. “Looking back on that mishegoss, I was really devastated,” Ramsay told Deadline in 2017. “I really wanted to make the film. It was a hard decision to do that [walking away], but it was becoming a different movie. In my head, I made it [the film]. That was a tough time, I wouldn’t bulls**t about that.”

One imagines Ramsay’s follow-up film, the brutal hired gun thriller “You Were Never Really Here” starring Joaquin Phoenix in one of his best performances, offers a decent idea of what a genre picture like “Jane Got a Gun” could’ve been like in her hands. Just image Phoenix in a cowboy hat the next (or first) time you watch it.